Writer. The Reengineers (HarperCollins). Masters in Creative Writing, University of Oxford

Memories of a Madras Summer, and a book giveaway

“The Madras summer begins in March. I remember reading in the Aside magazine that the season of hell begins in this month, the other three seasons of the city being, of course, hot, hotter and hottest. It was my favourite time of year, for the end of March meant the beginning of the long vacations. The idea of dying at the age of fifteen in the beloved summer month had seemed morbidly romantic, and I had almost looked forward to it. However, later that summer, I truly rejoiced in the heat, for the years of ice within me had finally thawed.”The Reengineers

I was especially delighted that The Reengineers was published in March. For in spite of Elmore Leonard’s much quoted rule of never starting a book with the weather, I chose to begin the novel describing a summer day in Madras.

A summer day in Madras in 1991, which is so far away in space and time that looking back, it feels almost like a different country. It was the age of the last few years before the advent of the internet. When time flowed so gently that a vacation felt like a lifetime, a weekend was an age and an evening passed like an eternity.

Fifteen year old Chinmay lived in this charming epoch of time and was planning to die there, but something happened on that day which changed his life. The Reengineers narrates this story.

I am giving away two copies of The Reengineers in exchange for reviews, and two more copies as part of a Goodreads giveaway. Both giveaways are open until 22 April 2015.

Please do enter the Goodreads give away or contact me for review copies of the book (the give aways are currently open only to readers in India), if you wish to know what happened to Chinmay on that summer day, the stories that he came across during his surreal adventure and why he chose to live at the end of it.

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Published by Indu Muralidharan

I am a writer from Chennai, India. My first novel The Reengineers (HarperCollins, 2015) is a metafictional exploration of the meaning of the self, examined through the relationship between an author and the character of his novel. I am working on two other novels at the moment, both centred around the healing power of fiction and its significance in 'real' life.
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